A DEGREE OF THE SURREAL,

THE NOT-ENTIRELY-REAL,

AND THE MARKEDLY ANTI-REAL

About

1. The turbulent flow of air driven backward by the propeller or propellers of an aircraft. Also called race2.

2. The area of reduced pressure or forward suction produced by and immediately behind a fast-moving object as it moves through air or water.

intr.v.slip·streamed, slip·stream·ing, slip·streams

To drive or cycle in the slipstream of a vehicle ahead.

3. a kind of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries between science fiction and fantasy and mainstream literary fiction.

The term slipstream was coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, in July 1989. He wrote:

"...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility."

Slipstream fiction has consequently been referred to as "the fiction of strangeness," at the heart of which is a cognitive dissonance..

Slipstream falls between speculative fiction and mainstream fiction. While some slipstream novels employ elements of science fiction or fantasy, not all do. The common unifying factor of these pieces of literature is some degree of the surreal, the not-entirely-real, or the markedly anti-real.

Posts Tagged ‘urban fantasy’

so, the blog site is live.

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not sure yet what it will be when it grows up, though I have been thinking on and off of it for months while Min has been building the site and in between all of that long, busy, diverse tour that started over a month ago in Ubud in Bali and is ending in chilly Toronto on the other side of the world. I know I want it to be as interesting to me as the blog residency Inside a Dog was and as engaging as the Greylands Launch Site was for visitors. But I am very conscious that both those were finite, month-long events that basically consumed every second of my time and all of my attention and creativity. They repaid that devouring of me with real insights and a lot of pleasurable engagement with the form, but ultimately I know I can’t sustain that for longer than a month. This blog must be something else again. Most of all, it must not stop me working. I want it to be a repository for comments, almost as if I was writing it for myself – a sort of free hand stream-of-conciousness record/letter to myself – a mental glance around and inside me to note what has accrued that I might want to consider or throw out or consider more deeply. I don’t want it to enable a visitor to enter into an engagement with me, but to allow them a glimpse … continue reading